Birmingham Bombings: Martin Cowley, who covered the bombings for The Irish Times, 30 years ago, recalls the night when 21 people were killed and more than 160 injured
We waited in the crowded airport lounge, the day's story virtually over. It was a time of bombs in England. Again.
The coffin of IRA man James McDaid, killed when his bomb exploded prematurely in Coventry, was about to be flown out of Birmingham airport to Dublin.
Now it was just a matter of finding a pay-phone and filing the story to Angela, Clare or Mrs McKay who nightly sweltered in the hot-house copytakers' cubicles in The Irish Times, typing up news from correspondents at home and abroad. Then someone half-whispered: "There's been a bomb in Birmingham." It was a season of carnage. Again.
The newspaper headlines of terrible times that preceded Birmingham tell the story.
Before transferring to The Irish Times London office in mid-1973, I had reported from Belfast where it was "normal" to compile a story each night wrapping together a toll of violence that mounted as one typed.
It seems now like some surreal whirl, a frenzy of life and death and work. But I was only writing about it. Think what it was like for those who suffered.
"Violence claims eight lives in North" The Irish Times headlined in May 15th, 1972. Headlines in those months such as; "Six killed, 146 injured in crowded street"; "Bodies of five shot men found in Belfast"; "Three Provisionals die in blast".
Violence had the North of Ireland by the throat. On the night of November 21st, 1974, the world shuddered at what happened in the English midlands city of Birmingham.
Twenty-one people killed and more than 160 people injured by two IRA bombs. In the scramble from the airport, we handful of Irish media reporters knew that city centre bombs meant death.
In an era before mobile phones and laptops, we didn't realise the extent of it until we arrived in Birmingham after a taxi dash.
The city was shocked, saddened and bitter.
The scene of the bombings had been sealed off and casualties taken away by the time we got there.
Held up in traffic jams, and taking detours, all we reporters could do was try to find eye-witnesses, among young couples and middle-aged groups who made their way home through the night cold.
They put comforting arms around each other, cardigans and jackets turned up around their heads against a light rainfall in the cold night.
It's unpleasant and invasive having to ask the almost inane questions like: "What was it like? What did you see? How do you feel?" But we did our best to salvage any scrap of eye-witness material or comment from a spur-of-the moment vox pop.
Any reporter who has covered such incidents knows to lower the voice as one dictates graphic disjointed witness descriptions from an open telephone kiosk in the path of passers-by.
Keeping in touch with chief sub-editor Peter Tynan O'Mahony, his customary serious tone matching the gravity of the night, I cupped a hand around the mouthpiece.
Instinct rather than any upfront antagonism told me that an Irish accent would not find a fertile response from passers-by. One knew that as in the wake of all IRA bombings in England, Irish people in Britain would feel the icy wind of ethnic isolation and anti-Irish contempt.
Call it craven, call it self-protection, call it an intention to get the job done, I wasn't talking loud that night.
People trailing home from the blast scene were reluctant to speak, but I pieced together a sequence of events and details that wrecked the lives of the casualties and their families, and six men who were falsely jailed for the crime.
It was one of those atrocity stories that grew steadily worse, since the death toll was not static. With police and hospital telephones jammed with incoming calls, confirmed details were fairly scant.
As the night wore on, so did the death list.
It was a miserable and a heart-breaking time. Press conferences and an early police triumph - nabbing six Irishmen as they were about to embark on the Heysham ferry for Belfast; spontaneous midlands factory protests that oozed a swelling bile against Irish people; a press visit to a hospital - and we Irish reporters yearning to quote an Irish nurse or doctor just to show that not all Irish people were bad.
The British government rushed through draconian legislation under which many suspected republican sympathisers would be sent back to Ireland.
The Birmingham suspects had been locked up and charged. Everything neatly wrapped, just waiting for the verdict. But the arrests and the case always looked just too smooth, too easy, too neat.
The night before the six were convicted at Lancaster Castle, I spent time with relatives of the defendants.
Some sought false hope. Did we think the six would be convicted?
The jury foreman said of each accused 21 times that he was guilty of murder.
RTÉ Radio asked me for a three-minute reflective piece for broadcast a few days later.
My final sentence was along the lines that only time would tell whether the right people had been jailed for the right crimes.